"Eureka!" I squealed in excitement, my cry echoing through the quiet, pre-dawn clearing, and startling a few morning birds.
I held the small, rectangular mold up to the fading moonlight and the gradually rising sun peeking out of the horizon, my heart thumping with a triumph I hadn't felt since... well, since we made that troller move the way I wanted it to.
In my hands sat a bar of light pink soap.
It wasn't perfect—the edges were a bit crumbly and it wasn't as hard as a store-bought bar—but it was soap. I had spent the last few hours hunched over a small, intense fire, meticulously rendering the boar fat into clear oil, straining out the impurities, and carefully mixing in the lye I'd created from wood ash.
